Re: [Audacity-quality] Play/Stop and Set Cursor button

[Gale A. <ga...@au...>]

Thanks for the suggestions. There are many alternatives. 

I feel that "simplifying" by reducing the number of transport
buttons is going to add complexity without any major benefit 
that offsets the upheaval of behavioural and shortcut changes. 

So except possibly for pursuing James' tidy up of the confusing
methods of enabling monitoring, my vote is to just add the new 
Stop and Set Cursor button. We already have a little unused 
space in Transport Toolbar from the removal of the CleanSpeech 
button. 

=======================================

Details (merely expansion of the above).   

I have no impression that the occasional obscene messages from 
users (I get them too) are to do with too many buttons on the 
Transport Toolbar. Where I get any further input, the problems  
cited are twofold:

* The number of items in the menus that are not relevant to that 
   user, and no (easily found) buttons for the items that are relevant
   (for example, "where the **** is the Save button!!!!!" was asked
   of me recently).

* "All the menus are greyed out", meaning that user has not pressed 
    Stop. I do think that some of these people see the Pause button as
    the Stop button. They don't know what Stop does or don't think 
    they need it. 

So I quite like the idea of Pause stopping and setting the cursor,
but this means Pause loses its monitoring function, which matters
for recording. Or are we suggesting that Pause always turns 
monitoring on, if it's not already on? If so, isn't that going to look 
confusing?

Is it possible to keep the audio stream open when pressing Pause
(as now), but stop the stream and set cursor when someone 
presses a menu item (which would accordingly not be greyed)? 

Is the restriction that you cannot edit when the stream is paused 
mandatory in the first place? 

Removing the Pause button by having Play turning to a Pause 
button sounds superficially attractive in so far as many software
players do that. But as Peter points out the Pause button is 
intuitive when recording, irrespective of its monitoring function. 
I doubt we should remove the Pause button.  

Steve wrote that we could: 
> Play - with button
> Stop - with button
> Play/Stop and set cursor - with button
> Pause - with button
> Play/Stop and return to start - shortcut only

I'm not keen on actions that can only be found in a menu or as a
shortcut in Keyboard Preferences. 


Steve wrote that:
> If we wish to reduce the number of buttons
> we could have one button for Play/Stop (button image shows Play 
> when stopped and changes to a Stop button when playing:
>
> Play/Stop - Plays when stopped. Stops and sets cursor when playing.
> Modifier key provides "Stop and return to start of selection".

Again we lose the "automatic return to start and play from there"
though I think that is probably a minor consideration.  

I think this is better than losing the Pause button, if losing a button
is important (which I doubt). 

I think it will still be too hard to discover how to Stop and return to 
the start. "Return to the start" is what Stop does in most media
players. 


James wrote:
> I'd be fine with changing the default to play-and-set-cursor and 
> record-and-set-cursor. Can we say that is agreed?

That's not what a Stop button is expected to do in most software
players. It's what a Pause button is expected to do, or to keep it
simpler, we could just add the Stop and Set Cursor button as
suggested and not overturn existing behaviours and shortcuts. 

If a new Stop and Set Cursor button only did what SHIFT + A does, 
and we kept a Pause button, do you (James) still think the Stop
and Set Cursor button should be blue? That seems confusing to
me.   


James wrote:
> We have meter enabled/disabled AND monitoring (=metering) on/off.
> Duplicate functionality.  We also have a third way to do it.  We can
> disable monitoring by not showing the meter toolbar.  This could do with
> a clean up.
> 
> When software play-thru is enabled metering also enables/disables 
> play-thru.

Don't understand that.  Software Playthrough still works for me on
Windows 7 if the meters are disabled or hidden. 


> This is poorly worked out and implemented and ripe for improvement.
> I do have specific proposals that would (a) work for me and (b)
> work for newbie users.  Don't currently have the stamina for a 20-e-mail
> exchange to discuss them.  In outline I'd be using the microphone and 
> speaker icons on the meters to control monitoring and indicate current 
> monitoring state.

This sounds interesting, and I'd love to try that out, but it sounds
like a lot of work for you.  If we agree not to discuss, can we still 
lobby for changes to the implementation if we see things that could 
be improved?


> I'd get rid of the pause button.  It could linger on as a 'P' key. If 
> you trust me enough to 'do the right thing' I will implement it.

I am not keen on getting rid of the Pause button, especially if we 
can't discuss it. We don't need to get rid of Pause to tidy up the  
duplicated monitoring methods do we? 


James wrote:
> It is (or should be) that Audacity can be open and doing nothing, other 
> than showing a waveform on screen, and users can be using some other Audio 
> program. That is not possible if we are always monitoring on the meters.

I thought another problem with "monitoring always on" was a red 
playback cursor or some display problem? 

If the other audio program doesn't use Windows DirectSound 
Exclusive Mode or WDM-KS, would our "monitoring always on" be 
much of a problem? I guess ALSA would be a problem, but if we just
had a button that could toggle monitoring "always on" and "always
off", that would seem to be an advance.   



Gale